Our Jesuit Tradition

Saint Joseph's University was founded by the Jesuits — visionary Catholic priests and educators who prioritized social justice, the pursuit of excellence, service to others, and the development of the whole person, or, cura personalis. One of only 28 universities and colleges nationwide exemplifying this 500-year- old Jesuit tradition, SJU offers each of its students an educational experience that will hone their skills, expand their knowledge, grow their faith and strengthen their character.

Dr. Berezovski earned a B.S. in Mathematics and a M.S. in Applied Mathematics at Ivan Franko National University in Lviv, Ukraine. She continued her education at Simon Fraser University in Canada where she received a M.S. and Ph.D. in Mathematics Education. In her graduate research, Dr. Berezovski studied the nature of understanding of mathematical concepts, analyzing encountered cognitive and epistemological obstacles. The qualitative findings enabled her to extend the study into the area of teacher’s knowledge and professional teacher training, related to teaching and learning mathematics.

In 2007, Dr. Berezovski joined the faculty of Department of Mathematics at Saint Joseph's University. Her current research involves the study of professional growth of teachers, mathematical problem solving, and instructional design using mathematics of sports.

Berezovski, T. (2007). Towards effective teaching of logarithms: the case for pre-service teachers. In T. Lamberg & L. Wiest (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty Ninth Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. (pp. 1144-1146). Stateline (Lake Tahoe), NV: University of Nevada, Reno.

Berezovski, T. & Sosa, T. (2009). "Visualization of One’s Own Teaching as a Domain of Professional Growth: The Case of Pedagogical Practices of Mathematics Teachers." P-12 sTEm Research Brown Bag luch series, College of Technology, Perdue University, West Lafayette, IN.

Berezovski, T. (2006). "On transcendental numbers: teachers’ understanding and their practices." Conference of the Special Interest Group of the MAA on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education. Piscataway, NJ.

Philadelphia STEM Teacher Fellow Program for High School Mathematics Teachers (SJU sub-award of Mathematics and Science Partnership grant with Philadelphia School District, Pennsylvania State Department of Education, $176,825.00)

2011 – 2012 Principal Investigator

Philadelphia STEM Teacher Fellow Program for High School Mathematics Teachers (SJU sub-award of Mathematics and Science Partnership grant with Philadelphia School District, Pennsylvania State Department of Education, $137,858.00)

2010 – 2011 Principal Investigator

Philadelphia STEM Teacher Fellow Program for High School Mathematics Teachers (SJU sub-award of Mathematics and Science Partnership grant with Philadelphia School District, Pennsylvania State Department of Education, $161,085.00)

Research

My research program is in the areas of: Mathematics Education (primarily Motivational Contexts for teaching Mathematics, Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, Pedagogical Content Knowledge, and issues of Technology in mathematics teaching and learning), and Mathematics (primarily Geometry, Algebra, and History of Mathematics). The major focus of my research work is teacher development (both at the preservice and inservice levels) of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) (Ball, Hill & Bass, 2005). Specifically, I study the central domain of MKT – the Specialized Mathematical Knowledge (SMK). This research is supported through two programs: the Math Science Partnership (funded by the State Department of Education), and the NOYCE scholarship program (funded by National Science Foundation).

Overall, my line of research is related to advancing and improving the mathematical knowledge of teachers (as well as my own) through various professional avenues, such as professional development, coursework, collaborations, summer institutes, and teacher support initiatives. My overall goal is to understand how prospective and practicing teachers learn mathematics, and how mathematics educators can enhance teacher learning. Consequently, I am interested in how mathematics can be taught, and how to prepare prospective and practicing mathematics teachers to become highly competent and effective in their profession. I have been pursuing my research interests in several ways.

My primary interests in the field of mathematics education are driven by my personal passion for mathematics learning. For example, I completed a collaborative study in Algebraic Topology related to properties of topological semigroups. These efforts resulted in a publication in the International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences, vol. 2010.

I began my career as a secondary school mathematics teacher. I tried to identify mathematical concepts that were difficult for my students. In particular, I was intrigued by the fact that logarithms were very problematic for students. After I entered graduate school, the inquiry into students’ understanding of logarithms and logarithmic functions became the focus of my graduate thesis. Given the opportunity to teach undergraduate mathematics, I continued to experiment with various ways of teaching logarithms to students. I developed different tasks that helped improve my students’ understanding of logarithms and as well as making their learning more creative and meaningful.

Later on, from my work with teachers, I learned that they too find concepts of logarithms and logarithmic functions problematic and challenging. According to my dissertation findings, the correlation between subject matter knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge is not isomorphic. In 2010, I received a 3-year Mathematics and Science Partnership (MSP) grant in a collaboration between Saint Joseph’s University and the Philadelphia School District. This grant is focused on providing support through content-based professional development to secondary mathematics teachers. Through the Summer Intensive Institute, participating teachers have an opportunity to extend their mathematical knowledge beyond traditional undergraduate mathematics courses, and to enhance their specialized knowledge and skills to prepare them for success in educating students according to the expectations of the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSI, 2010). The project targets in-service and pre-service secondary mathematics teachers.

Witnessing an increasing influence of technology on our lives, led me to believe that incorporating technological tools into education might change our perspectives on the ways we teach and learn. Specifically, I am interested in further examining the integration of non-cognitive technology, such as electronic response systems (clickers), into mathematics education that would create an opportunity for the cognitive growth of learners. Thus, my research program related to technology-related issues in education, is primarily based on my belief that generational shifts bring new avenues and exciting opportunities for educational research. With shifts in technology, some of our knowledge becomes obsolete - creating the need for new more suitable knowledge (that may not be familiar to us). To continue our journey as educators and researchers, we need to gain a better understanding of what the up-coming generation of students needs to know (or knows already), how they learn and process new information, and how does technology affect their thinking, mind, social, cultural, and cognitive interactions.